Having just received my box set for the latest Paranoia I was excited to run character creation with my group on Saturday but I ran into a issue during the process. I am sure it will just be something I have misunderstood but having read the section multiple times, I am not sure where. So hoping someone can show me where I am came off the rails !!

The issue arose during the skill section of the game and so I will give an example of what happened. Lets assume we have 4 players and a GM .. going from the GM's left we have James, Walter, John and Brian.

We start with James selecting a skill at +1, which is Melee, so Walter now has the skill at -1. Walter now selects Bluff at +1, and John receives it at -1. John now takes Guns at +1, so Brian has it at -1. finally Brian takes Stealth at +1. so James has it at -1.

So that is the first round of skill selection finished with. We start the second round and Walter will be the first person to select a +2 skill.

Walter decides he wants Guns as he doesn't already have it and no one has selected it this round. So Walter marks +2 on his sheet and John, who is the next player along receives it at -2. Now John already has Guns at +1, so ummm ... he now has it at -1 or -2 ? . This also means by the end of character creation John wont have 5 positive skills and 5 negative, instead he will have more negative and that of course affects his actual starting stat levels (As it will be one less positive when determining your 4 stat numbers at the beginning) .

This happened multiple times last night as we generated characters and I ended up with characters with only 9 skills not 10 and an imbalance of Neg to Pos skills and lower stats.

The only way we could generate characters who ended up with 5 positive skills and 5 negative skills is to say that if the player to your left already had that skill listed, you couldn't select it yourself. Essentially meaning you will start with it as 0. So in the example above, Walter wanted Guns, but because John had it at +1, he couldn't.

So ... What am I doing wrong ? There is 1000 XP points for the brave troubleshooter who helps me figure this out ! My group is pretty excited to play the game, so I'd like to get this settled.

The red box on the next page says it all.
It is all up to the GM rulings, taking into account the 3 main rules:
1. Each skill can be chosen once per round
2. You can't pick a skill you already have
3. You end with 5 positive skills and 5 negative skills
Here are two examples:
1) You can't take another character's possitive skill. When you get to round five, you ignore the first rule, if a player is stuck at a situation that he can't pick a skill.
2) You can replace another character's +skill with a -skill. After the last round, every character who's missing a skill, gets to pick a new skill to fill in the missing skill.

You can mix them anyway you want. If you have any better ideas, and if the GM agrees, use those as well.
As it says in page 17, trust the GM's judgement.

Advice for GM's:
Read pages: 101-102 (most important), and page 86, to get a feel of how you're supposed to run anything that seems treasonous.

Like yourself I came up with a way to fix the issue (As I listed) but I guess my issue stems from that the designers must have known players would bump into this issue almost immediately and in my honest opinion, should have explained some various ways to deal with it. For me I was mid character creation with my group when I discovered it, and this utterly ground the fun to a halt as we had a long discussion about, if A) I was doing it wrong lol and B) how we should resolve it.

It is quite easy to reach the final round, and have at least 1 player if not more with 6 negative skills and 4 positive. I can think of a 100 ways to fix it, but I guess when I posted I was curious about A) Other peoples methods, which I appreciate you listing your 2 examples, and B) What the actual designers did.

When the second preview of the game was sent to the KS backers we had a discussion about those rules specifically (the rules written then are the same as now). The preview that came after that said that a player's +skill will be replaced with a -skill, that raised the question that not all players will have the same ammount of skills. In the next preview, the rules returned to the original text.
My opinion, seeing that character creation is the introduction to the game, it gives the GM the chance to get to know the players and raise expectations. Which is why I gave those two examples:
If you want a calmer fame with less tension, don't let the players take of points. If you want a more competitive game, have players replace points and then fill in the blanks. (A special case:If you just want to have a "no survivors" game have the players subtract points from each other up to round five, and move on.)
Hope it was helpful

I would use Phineas' solution of shifting the value to an unassigned skill.

On paper with four sheets I ran a sample simulation.
Round 1 - No issues
Round 2 - player 2 cannot assign -2 to guns because they took 1 in guns during first round.
By simply shifting the "inherited" value I was able to get everyone to have a full set of stats: 5 negative, 5 positive, 5 zero's

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